Oracle did not disclose the price, but it obviously was less than the $1.2 billion VMware paid for SDN startup Nicira Networks last week. Cisco also has a $100 million investment in Insieme to deliver similar technology.

Xsigo didn’t use the term SDN to describe itself, but Oracle did when announcing the deal. Xsigo marketed itself with the simpler term of I/O virtualization. Maybe that’s because using its software required customers to purchase a fabric director switch, and sometimes expansion switches and I/O cards.

But Oracle may choose to deploy the IP differently. Oracle isn’t likely to go into much detail for its plans until after the deal closes, which probably won’t be before October.

The first priority for Oracle when it makes an acquisition is to use the new technology to optimize Oracle products. But in a Q&A document Oracle released today, it said it would continue to support Xsigo customers and the cloud as well as the Oracle stack.

“While we expect to optimize Xsigo’s performance with the Oracle stack, Xsigo’s products will continue to support all heterogeneous environments and benefit any cloud deployment,” was Oracle’s answer to whether Xsigo products will continue to operate with non-Oracle systems.

Like VMware and Cisco, Oracle recognizes that server virtualization is changing the way those servers connect to storage and networks. Oracle will use Xsigo to address those changes.

“Oracle recognizes that achieving revolutionary improvements in both performance and efficiency requires a paradigm shift in the way compute and storage systems are interconnected and how that system interconnection is managed,” Oracle said in its release. “Xsigo simplifies cloud infrastructure and operations by allowing customers to dynamically connect any server to any network and storage, resulting in increased asset utilization and application performance while reducing cost. Because Xsigo consolidates and virtualizes the physical resources utilized to interconnect servers and storage, Xsigo is uniquely positioned to simplify the management of virtualized server and storage connectivity.”

Along with its directors and switches, Xsigo’s technology includes Fabric Accelerator software that connects virtual machines to storage and networks through software links that Xsigo calls Private Virtual Interconnects. It also has a Fabric Manager application to create, monitor and manage connections between servers and storage/networks.

Xsigo, founded in 2004, claims more than 300 customers including eBay and CarFax. Oracle said it expects Xsigo management and employees to join Oracle after the acquistion closes.

Storage Networking World always provides a chance to see what vendors want to inform the world about from their product perspective. It also includes presentations focused on education and general information for storage managers. These two perspectives often contrast, showing that the adoption rates of new technologies in data centers often runs at a different pace than delivery of new technology.

The vendor offerings are interesting to look at from a quantitative perspective:  what is popular as a focus area?  At last week’s SNW in Santa Clara, Calif., there were two distinct areas of popularity (quantitatively):  solid state devices (SSDs) and anything to do with “cloud.” The cloud is being liberally attributed to many different products and operational environments. This does not mean there were no storage systems and management software solutions presented, but they were greatly outnumbered by SSD and cloud offerings.

These products represented the popular ones at the event and certainly many of the offerings were new.  The “next” from vendors were some novel offerings that may become popular products or solutions of the future.  More of the new technologies seem to be unveiled at SNW in the fall rather than the spring. 

Fitting into the new category but not really representing particularly new products were integrated or coordinated solutions meant to replace or help manage point products.  This is recognition that there is another level of opportunity beyond delivering a new or novel product. That opportunity is in integrating solutions into the operational workflow in an IT environment.

 (Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).